X-Cart E-Commerce Hosting

Semi-dedicated hosting built for X-Cart, on servers tuned for it and looked after by people who run e-commerce sites all day. We take care of the technical side so that you can get on with running the shop.

If you already have an X-Cart store elsewhere we will move it to one of our X-Cart servers free of charge, and if you are starting out we will install it for you, also free.

Why X-Cart needs more than ordinary shared hosting

X-Cart is a substantial PHP application. Every page view involves catalogue queries, price and tax calculation, session handling and template rendering, and an admin doing bulk work can generate more load than every shopper on the site combined.

On general purpose shared hosting that shows up as a store which is fine at ten in the morning and unusable during a promotion. The resources are shared with whatever else happens to be on the machine, and the configuration is a compromise aimed at simple brochure sites.

Our X-Cart plans are semi-dedicated. We limit the number of stores on each server, and where possible we spread them geographically so that their busy periods do not land at the same time. You get guaranteed headroom rather than an average.

Built for the way X-Cart works

The tuning matters as much as the resources. These servers run current, supported PHP versions with sensible memory limits, a MySQL configuration suited to catalogue and order queries rather than to generic workloads, and the caching layers X-Cart expects to have available.

Zend OpCache is enabled on every plan, so PHP is compiled once and held in memory instead of being recompiled on every request. Memcached and Redis object caching are available on the larger plans and are considerably faster than the file based cache X-Cart falls back on by default, which tells most on stores with large catalogues and many concurrent shoppers.

What running a store here looks like

• cPanel, so you keep direct control of files, databases, email and PHP version
• Free SSL certificates, issued and renewed automatically, which a shop cannot operate without
• Daily backups you can restore yourself, down to a single file or a single database
• Free installation of X-Cart if you are starting a new store
• Free migration if you already have one elsewhere
• Support from people who administer the servers, not a script

Payment gateways and PCI

Any gateway X-Cart supports will work here. The practical points are that your store needs a valid certificate on every page rather than just the checkout, which is handled automatically, and that keeping the application patched is the part of PCI compliance that actually catches people out. We will tell you when your PHP version or your store version is falling behind rather than waiting for a scan to fail.

Keeping the store fast as it grows

Two things sit outside hosting and both have a large effect.

Modules. Every module runs on every request, and a badly written one can bypass the caching that keeps the store quick. Keep the list to what you genuinely use.

Images. Product photography uploaded straight from a camera is the single most common reason an otherwise healthy store feels slow. Resizing on upload costs nothing and is usually worth more than a plan upgrade.

If your store is slow and you are not sure why, ask before upgrading. We can see what is happening on the server, and the answer is frequently something that costs nothing to fix.

Moving an existing X-Cart store

Migrations are free and we do them regularly.

We copy the store across, get it working on our servers and let you test it properly on a temporary address. Your existing store stays live and taking orders throughout, and DNS changes only when you are satisfied. We plan that switch so it costs no downtime, and we handle the email on the domain as part of the move.

Growing beyond these plans

You can move up through the semi-dedicated plans as the store grows and then, if you need to, on to one of our dedicated servers. We handle the whole process, usually with no downtime at all.

If you are still deciding which platform to build on, we also host CubeCart, Magento and WooCommerce, and we will give you an honest view of which suits what you sell rather than steering you at the most expensive plan.

Plans and pricing

Prices are shown below for annual payment, which represents the best value, and quarterly payment is available on all plans. A three month free trial is available for testing or for developing a new store; a live site open to the public needs to move to a paid plan straight away.